When in French

by Lauren Collins

  Jacques and my mother were huddled over a citronella candle, Jacques saying something about when a man loves a woman. The exchanges going on around me were dispatches from the far poles of my identity. It was as though one of the house’s amenities were a satellite dish that allowed me to surf among all the channels of my existence.

  “We knew, the first time we met Olivier, that he came from a very special family,” my mother said.

  I could tell that her compliment wasn’t getting through.

  “Mom, ‘special’ means more like ‘weird’ in French.”

  She looked at Jacques pleadingly.

  “I meant ‘special’ in English!”

  The candles were burning down, and the pool was getting cold. The bedtime routine was one of the junctures Olivier and I had been dreading. In his family, you weren’t slinking off to your room without having fait la bise. In mine, you weren’t kissing anybody you weren’t sharing a bed with. We watched with trepidation as everyone began to take their leave.

  “Good night, John,” Jacques said to my father, sticking out a firm hand.

  “Good night, Jacques,” my father replied, planting a dainty kiss on Jacques’s cheek, as eager to mirror the mores of his environment as a tennis fan dressed in whites.

  He turned to Anne-Laure, who was hanging out some towels over the back of a chair.

  “Want to try with me?”

  • • •

  FIFTY LIVRES and a hope chest containing a thousand pins, a hundred sewing needles, four lace braids, two knives, scissors, stockings, gloves, shoe ribbons, a bonnet, a headdress, a taffeta handkerchief, a comb, and a spool of white thread—this was the dowry by which Louis XIV enticed some 770 Frenchwomen to undertake passage to Quebec between 1663 and 1673. The women sailed from Dieppe and La Rochelle. Virgins and widows, they ranged in age from fourteen to fifty-nine. These filles du roi—daughters of the king—had a sole purpose: to marry settlers. As Jean Talon, the first intendant of New France, wrote to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis’s minister of finance, “It is important in the establishment of a country to sow good seed.”

  French brides for French subjects: the program cost the crown dearly, but the impulse was understandable. A nation does not go to the trouble of colonizing another only to let its protocols dissipate. No king aspires to be the one who lets his civilization die in a foreign land, just as no parent dreams that his child will grow up to marry someone who doesn’t speak their language. The men of New France could have found wives among the native people of Canada. The colonizers were not so much concerned with genetic impurity as they were with cultural attenuation. When, after nearly a century in North America, it became clear that Frenchmen were becoming more like the native people than the native people were becoming like Frenchmen—“We haven’t obliged the savages to learn our language, rather in order to do business with them we’re required to learn theirs,” Colbert complained—the government brought in the filles du roi, girls-next-door imported across an ocean.

  In 1671 alone, they bore nearly seven hundred children. Two-thirds of French Canadians are descended from one or more of them. Ambroisine Doigt. Marguerite Bonnefoy. Etoinette Lamoureaux. Marie-Rose Vivien, Marie-Rogère Lepage, Marie-Perette Lauriot, Marie-Anne Poussin. There was even a Brazilian-born woman, baptized in Portugal, named Espérance Du Rosaire—unable to sign her name, referred to as “the moor.” They must have been so lonely. More than half of them had lost their fathers. Many of them came from Paris’s Salpêtrière charity hospital, whose poorer wards slept three to five to a bed. Marie de l’Incarnation, who led the Ursuline sisters of Quebec, wrote that the city girls, especially, struggled to adjust: “We no longer wish to ask for any girls except those from villages, suited for men’s work. Experience has led us to see those who were not raised up for it, who were not suited for [life] here, being in a misery out from which they cannot pull themselves.” The shift from an urban environment to a rural one, though, was surely the least of their disorientations.

  But getting on a ship, crouching in the hold with the livestock during squalls, risking dysentery and scurvy, to arrive in a frigid wilderness where food was so scarce that one might die of scurvy anyway represented to them an opportunity. The women were virtually guaranteed marriages and families that they likely would not have otherwise made. Theirs was a conservative maneuver, a great risk taken in the service of perpetuating the past rather than breaking from it. The first question a fille du roi asked of a suitor was, “Have you built a home upon your land?” Remote as it was, New France was a chance at continuity. Their patrimonies might be preserved.

  • • •

  VIOLETA AND TEDDY ARRIVED—she in a white lace dress, he in a pressed guayabera. They got changed and joined everyone on the patio. Teddy was wearing a budgie smuggler, but my family played it cool. Violeta had gone for a conservative look in a fringed tangerine bikini. It was a mellow morning—my father dozing, a book on his chest; Matt and Fabrice beached side by side on a pair of loungers, overworked young professionals catching up on rest. We were all sun worshipers, with the exception of my mother. She was sitting in the shade with her iPad.

  “I’m sending pictures of Corsica to all my friends!” she said. “Oh, look, an e-mail from Marie.”

  Marie was a neighbor my mother often ran into on her morning walks, chanting along to the French tapes.

  “Are you throwing tomatoes yet?” she read aloud. “Also are you having lots of fun? I hope you all are having a wonderful time. Hi to John, Matt, Lauren & O, and Melissa.”

  I recognized the “O” dodge—the sign of a correspondent who couldn’t quite figure out Olivier’s name. It was an understandable move. A friend had once written to me ahead of a journey to Wilmington, wishing “a safe trip to you and Olivia.”

  “What’s she talking about, ‘tomatoes’?”

  “Not sure!” my mom replied. “I’ll write back and ask.”

  The next e-mail from Marie had the subject line “Wrong country.”

  “Just realized Corsica is in Italy,” she wrote. “Thinking it was Spain where it is tomato day. Pictured all of you in red from tossing tomatoes at each other.”

  • • •

  ACTUALLY, some parents do dream of their children growing up to marry someone who speaks a different language. The Tukanoan people of the Northwest Amazon divide themselves into sixteen different patrilineal descent groups, each of which speaks one of sixteen languages. According to Tukanoan mythology, the sixteen groups arose at the beginning of time, when the “first people” came from the east in an anaconda-shaped canoe. Having conquered the waters of the underworld, they ascended the Vaupés River. At each stop along the way, the ancestors of a specific language group got out of the canoe and began to settle the area. This etiology jibes with the historical likelihood that, fleeing the Portuguese in the eighteenth century, various Tukanoan tribes sought refuge in the upper Vaupés. Living in proximity, and with common enemies, they consider themselves a single people. They maintain separate roles within the culture, however, by practicing linguistic exogamy—the requirement that a man marry a woman from a different language group.

  All Tukanoans are multilingual, speaking at least three languages, including Tukano, the regional lingua franca. When a woman marries, she moves to her husband’s longhouse and takes on his language. A child’s parents never come from the same language group. There is a strong taboo against mixing languages—a woman who lets Barà words creep into a Tuyuka conversation, for example, will be chided for setting a bad example for her offspring. As the anthropologist Jean E. Jackson explains in The Fish People, her study of life in a Tukanoan longhouse from 1969 to 1972, “Although everyone is multilingual, individuals identify with and are loyal to only one language, their father language.” When Jackson asked a Tukanoan why his people continued to speak so many languages, when they could all speak Tukano, he replied, “If we all were Tu
kano speakers, where would we get our women?” As obvious as the arrangement is to the Tukanoan, it leaves the non-Tukanoan mystified. Why, with hammocks to weave and manioc to mash, do they persist in maintaining sixteen languages when one would suffice? Why is the marriage of two speakers of the same language an impossibility, as incestuous as the union of a brother and a sister would be to us?

  The organization of Tukanoan society suggests that language is not culture. But at the same time it enacts a sort of intuitive linguistic relativism, a conviction that languages are fundamental delimiters of people, and that some advantage lies in the preservation of their differences.

  Jackson describes night in a Tukanoan longhouse as a “well-orchestrated choral piece, featuring dog barks, baby cries, coughs, farts, laughter, bad dreams, conversation, goings and comings (which involve lifting the heavy door each time), replenishing the fire, and songs.” Attending a festival, she recalls, “Our longhouse group had been crowded into a single small house with two other groups of visitors, and during the evening one woman suddenly became seriously ill. She started screaming with pain (the aspirin I gave her had no visible effect) and continued to scream all night. Throughout, her companions played two different radios at full volume, and all of the men stayed up processing coca, smoking, drinking manioc beer, and laughing.” Jackson writes that although these juxtapositions made her uncomfortable, they were probably for the best. The woman didn’t feel pressure to manage her screams, on top of her pain, and the men didn’t have to stifle their revelry, creating resentment. The cacophony was actually something harmonious. Perhaps Babel finally gets built in a riot.

  • • •

  VIOLETA AND TEDDY had been to Corsica several times. Wanting to make sure that my parents didn’t miss out on the sights, they volunteered to take them to Bonifacio, a citadel town about an hour down the coast. Nobody else felt like going. Olivier and I would have joined them, but we’d promised to accompany the rest of the group to the beach. We were skeptical of the idea of the four of them setting off alone, with no obvious way to communicate. Besides, they would have to take our car. My parents had never driven in a non-English-speaking country; Violeta and Teddy had never driven an automatic transmission. Olivier gave Teddy a brief tutorial, and off they went, lurching down the driveway.

  At the beach, we rented paddleboards, gondoliering ourselves around for hours in the midday glare. We could hear helicopters, buzzing off to attend to a brush fire. The afternoon lazed into evening, the sun still high, as we drank cold Pietras at a snack bar shaded by Corsican pines.

  “Putain, it’s six thirty!” Olivier said, herding everyone into the car.

  We sped back to the house.

  “Coucou?” Olivier called out, jiggling the key in the lock.

  Nobody was there.

  As we envisioned disaster scenarios, our parents were driving up the N198. The men were in the front, speaking fragmented Spanish, my father’s originating from high school and Teddy’s from classes at the Andernos community center. The women were in the back, chatting away in some sort of international mom language. They had been talking for six hours.

  “Bonifacio was amazing,” my mother said, stumbling in the door.

  “That’s great, Sue,” Olivier said, relaxing for the first time all day. “What did you do?”

  She fished her phone out of her bag and started swiping through the photo gallery.

  “We went to lunch in this little restaurant, and then we went to a church, and then we did this long walk on this staircase that’s cut into the cliffs. Oh, there were these weird piles of rocks! I couldn’t figure out what they were—like somebody was building a kiln?”

  “What’s a kiln?” Olivier said.

  At last: kryptonite. I’d heard Olivier make little mistakes before—they often had the effect of improving upon the term in question, as in “mind melt,” or “This place is a Dumpster,” or thinking that the abbreviation for our accountant Arthur’s name was Arth—but I’d never seen him genuinely stumped. Kiln—a four-letter noun meaning that our vulnerability was mutual; that the burden of learning, forever regenerating like laundry, was shared; that from now on I was going to start talking about pottery whenever I felt myself on the losing end of a linguistic power struggle. Kiln!

  That night we cooked out on the patio. Hugo, having somehow turned the pool lights to a disco setting, was practicing his jackknifes. Fabrice and Anne-Laure were giving Matt and Melissa tips on Paris restaurants while my father manned the grill. Olivier, ever vigilant, circulated like a maître d’. I was sitting with my mother and Violeta, who were discussing the care of the elderly in different parts of the world.

  “Il y a quinze ans je suis allée en Chine et les maisons de retraite m’ont beaucoup impressionnées,” Violeta was saying.

  “So, Violeta went to China fifteen years ago, and the nursing homes there were really nice,” I said.

  “Really?” my mother said. “I’m so surprised.”

  “Ah bon?” I repeated. “Ça m’etonne.”

  Olivier had sneaked up behind me.

  “Lauren can translate!” he said, seeming as proud as he was shocked.

  “Je peux traduire!”

  “That’s—”

  Over by the grill, a dance party had broken out. Rihanna was blasting from the stereo. Melissa, Hugo, and Matt, shouting out the lyrics, had formed a kickline. Fabrice was raising the roof with a pair of tongs. My father and Anne-Laure had found a broomstick, which they were using as a maypole.

  • • •

  CORSICA IS IN FRANCE. It has been since 1769, when the French army defeated Corsican irregulars, led by Pascal Paoli, at the Battle of Ponte Novu. Carlo Buonaparte, an attorney, and his wife, Letizia, had been on the bridge—the Corsicans, according to Voltaire, reloaded their muskets behind a barricade built of corpses—fighting to preserve the independent republic that Paoli had declared fourteen years earlier. The battle lost, they joined a fleeing cortège. Carlo carried a gourd of water and a dagger. Letizia had a baby boy, Joseph, lying in a saddle basket and was six months pregnant. They endured weeks of snow and rain, hard bread in cold caves. As they forded a swollen river, Letizia’s mule lost its footing, and she and her children were almost swept away. This was May. By late summer the party had made it to Ajaccio, where on August 15 Letizia went into labor during mass. Napoleon, who would later Frenchify the family name, was born almost immediately, with a large head and weak legs.

  Pascal Paoli, in exile in London, was greeted as a hero. “I was, for the rest of my life, set free from a slavish timidity in the presence of great men, for where shall I find a man greater than Paoli?” Boswell wrote in An Account of Corsica, a blockbuster of the time. (During Boswell’s lifetime, the book outsold his biography of Dr. Johnson.) In America, one of the founding members of the Sons of Liberty named his son Paschal Paoli McIntosh. Revolutionaries met at General Paoli’s Tavern, in Paoli, Pennsylvania, where “Remember Paoli” was spelled out in copper pennies hammered into the floor.

  Corsica is “a mountain in a sea”—easy to invade, impossible to subdue. Its earliest inhabitants left dolmens and menhirs, somber monuments that seem to warn one off the island like scarecrows. In 540 BC, the Greeks arrived. The Romans succeeded them in 237. Over nearly a millennium, Corsica absorbed and repelled the conquests of the Vandals, the Ostrogoths, the Lombards, the Aragonians, and the Saracens. In 1284 the Genoans wrested the island from the Pisans, ruling, with fluctuating degrees of control, until Paoli’s declaration of sovereignty in 1755, after which they handed it to France in a secret deal. Corsica has always been an anomaly: a birthplace of constitutional democracy and the last bastion of the vendetta, where seafaring cosmopolitanism coexists with montagnard distrust. It is a site of strange amalgamations: the priest reciting the sacraments with pistols on the altar, the eel that is said to mate with the snake, the fisherman who can’t swim. Admiral Nelso
n lost an eye there.

  The island’s motley culture has long sat uneasily within the centralized one of mainland France. After the world wars a nationalist movement arose that has lobbied for the past half century, often violently, for Corsican independence. In 1998 the préfet of Corsica was assassinated—three bullets in the neck—on his way home from the theater. His killer was not apprehended until 2003, when images from an infrared camera led police to the mountains, where he had been hiding in a shepherd’s hut.

  The centerpiece of the Corsican nationalist movement is the preservation and revival of the Corsican language. Like French, it derives from Latin, but it is heavily influenced by Italian dialects, mainly Tuscan. Italian speakers can follow Corsican, but French speakers can’t. Corsicans speak French, but many of them consider it a colonial imposition, as one nationalist wrote, “a pretentious language that has nourished itself on the cadavers of other languages.” Though only 65 percent of them speak Corsican, it remains the repository of their heritage and the emblem of their pride. Another Corsican graffito reads “Morta a lingua, mortu u populu”—Kill a language, kill a people. On the island’s bilingual road signs, it is common to see French place-names painted over in black.

  Corsica is sparsely populated, but somehow it’s a loud place, the host of a racket as layered and heterogeneous as the maquis’s scent. In all the noise, articulation is crucial: lore has it that the mazzeri—local seers who could both predict death and inflict it—were the products of botched baptisms, at which the priest had bungled the words or the godparents repeated them imprecisely. Until the late nineteenth century, Corsican was primarily a spoken language. One of its most cherished expressions is the ancient tradition of polyphonic singing, in which, under the right conditions, the voices of four singers combine to conjure an invisible interlocutor—the “ghost tone” or “fifth voice.”